Things That Matter to My Students

After writ­ing about 1000 Things That Mat­ter and describ­ing how I would use it with my stu­dents, I spent the week doing that activ­ity with sev­eral groups in the three ele­men­tary schools where I work.

The results were fas­ci­nat­ing. In every group, the stu­dents were thor­oughly engaged and per­son­ally invested. Their analy­sis of the com­ments already posted at the site was par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing. Though there were some slight dif­fer­ences in the vocab­u­lary they used to describe it, they con­sis­tently iden­ti­fied the same themes recur­ring in most of the comments:

• Love
• Joy
• Peace
• Rela­tion­ships

It was also inter­est­ing to notice that the stu­dents’ own thoughts about what mat­ters to them tended to fall into these same themes, with fam­ily being by far the most com­monly men­tioned idea.

I think what I found most excit­ing about this was see­ing the kids debat­ing the rel­a­tive worth of all of the things dif­fer­ent peo­ple thought were impor­tant. Their insights were rather mature, actu­ally. When I first planned this, I was con­cerned that the stu­dents might not take it seri­ously. But they did, and when I closed the class period by rec­om­mend­ing they have the same con­ver­sa­tion with their par­ents, they seemed eager to do so.

The power of this activ­ity came from the way the stu­dents could read­ily access opin­ions of peo­ple from around the world. What I would really love to do is take this even deeper by shar­ing their work with other stu­dents in other schools. If you have used the 1000 Things That Mat­ter web site and you’re inter­ested in shar­ing your stu­dents’ work with mine, post a com­ment here.